Anton Chekhov

Translated by Ivy Litvinov

[1] They went back to the house.And only after the lamp was lit in the great drawingroom on the upper floor, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanich, in silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were seated in arm-chairs, while Alekhin, washed and combed, paced the room in his new frock-coat, enjoying the warmth, the cleanliness, his dry clothes and comfortable slippers, while the fair Pelageya, smiling benevolently, stepped noiselessly over the carpet with her tray of tea and preserves, did Ivan Ivanich embark upon his yarn, the ancient dames, young ladies, and military gentlemen looking down at them severely from the gilded frames, as if they, too, were listening.

[2] “There were two of us brothers,” he began.“Ivan Ivanich (me), and my brother Nikolai Ivanich, two years younger than myself.I went in for learning and became a veterinary surgeon, but Nikolai started working in a government office when he was only nineteen.Our father, Chimsha-Himalaisky, was educated in a school for the sons of private soldiers, but was later promoted to officer’s rank, and was made a hereditary noble man and given a small estate.After his death the estate had to be sold for debts, but at least our childhood was passed in the freedom of the countryside, where we roamed the fields and the woods like peasant children, taking the horses to graze, peeling bark from the trunks of limetrees, fishing, and all that sort of thing.And anyone who has once in his life fished for perch, or watched the thrushes fly south in the autumn, rising high over the village on clear, cool days, is spoilt for town life, and will long for the countryside for the rest of his days.My brother pined in his government office.The years passed and he sat in the same place every day, writing out the same documents and thinking all the time of the same thing — how to get back to the country.And these longings of his gradually turned into a definite desire, into a dream of purchasing a little estate somewhere on the bank of a river or the shore of a lake.

[3] “He was a meek, good-natured chap, I was fond of him, but could feel no sympathy with the desire to lock oneself up for life in an estate of one’s own.They say man only needs six feet of earth.But it is a corpse, and not man, which needs these six feet.And now people are actually saying that it is a good sign for our intellectuals to yearn for the land and try to obtain country-dwellings.And yet these estates are nothing but those same six feet of earth.To escape from the town, for the struggle, for the noise of life, to escape and hide one’s head on a country-estate, is not life, but egoism, idleness, it is a sort of renunciation, but renunciation without faith.It is not six feet of earth, not a country-estate, that man needs, but the whole globe, the whole of nature, room to display his qualities and the individual characteristics of his soul.

[4] “My brother Nikolai sat at his office-desk, dreaming of eating soup made from his own cabbages, which would spread a delicious smell all over his own yard, of eating out of doors, on the green grass, of sleeping in the sun, sitting for hours on a bench outside his gate, and gazing at the fields and woods.Books on agriculture, and all those hints printed on calendars were his delight, his favorite spiritual nourishment.He was fond of reading newspapers, too, but all he read in them was advertisements of the sale of so many acres of arable and meadowland, with residence attached, a river, an orchard, a mill, and ponds fed by springs.His head was full of visions of garden paths, flowers, fruit, nesting-boxes, carpponds, and all that sort of thing.These visions differed according to the advertisements he came across, but for some reason gooseberry bushes invariably figured in them.He could not picture to himself a single estate or picturesque nook that did not have gooseberry bushes in it.

[5] “‘Country life has its conveniences,’ he would say, ‘you sit on the verandah, drinking tea, with your own ducks floating on the pond, and everything smells so nice, and...and the gooseberries ripen on the bushes.’

[6] “He drew up plans for his estate, and every plan showed the same features: a) the main residence, b) the servant’s wing, c) the kitchen-garden, d) gooseberry bushes.He lived thriftily, never ate or drank his fill, dressed anyhow, like a beggar, and saved up all his money in the bank.He became terribly stingy.I could hardly bear to look at him, and whenever I gave him a little money, or sent him a present on some holiday, he put that way, too.Once a man gets an idea into his head, there’s no doing anything with him.

[7] “The years passed, he was sent to another gubernia, he was over forty, and was still reading advertisements in the papers, and saving up.At last I heard he had married.All for the same purpose, to buy himself an estate with gooseberry bushes on it, he married an ugly elderly widow, for whom he had not the slightest affection, just because she had some money.After his marriage he went on living as thriftily as ever, half-starving his wife, and putting her money in his own bank account.Her first husband had been a postmaster, and she was used to pies and cordials, but with her second husband she did not even get enough black bread to eat.She began to languish under such a regime, and three years later yielded up her soul to God.Of course my brother did not for a moment consider himself guilty of her death.Money, like vodka, makes a man eccentric.There was a merchant in our town who asked for a plate of honey on his deathbed and ate up all his bank-notes and lottery tickets with the honey, so that no one else should get it.And one day when I was examining a consignment of cattle at a railway station, a drover fell under the engine and his leg was severed from his body.We carried him all bloody into the waiting-room, terrible sight, and he did nothing but beg us to look for his leg, worrying all the time — there were twenty rubles in the boot, and he was afraid they would be lost.”

[8] “You’re losing the thread,” put in Burkin.

[9] Ivan Ivanich paused for a moment, and went on: “After his wife’s death my brother began to look about for an estate.You can search for five years, of course, and in the end make a mistake, and buy something quite different from what you dreamed of.My brother Nikolai bought three hundred acres, complete with gentleman’s house, servants’ quarters, and a park, as well as a mortgage to be paid through an agent, but there were neither an orchard, gooseberry bushes, nor a pond with ducks on it.There was a river, but it was as dark as coffee, owing to the fact that there was a brick-works on one side of the estate, and bone-kilns on the other, nothing daunted, however, my brother Nikolai Ivanich ordered two dozen gooseberry bushes and settled down as a landed proprietor.

[10] “Last year I paid him a visit.I thought I would go and see how he was getting on there.In his letters my brother gave his address as Chumbaroklova Pustosh or Himalaiskoye.I arrived at Himalaiskoye in the afternoon.It was very hot.Everywhere were ditches, fences, hedges, rows of fir-trees, and it was hard to drive into the yard and find a place to leave one’s carriage.As I went a fat ginger-coloured dog, remarkably like a pig, came out to meet me.It looked as if it would have barked if it were not so lazy.The cook, who was also fat and like a pig, came out of the kitchen, barefoot, and said her master was having his after-dinner rest.I made my way to my brother’s room, and found him sitting up in bed, his knees covered by a blanket.He had aged, and grown stout and flabby.His cheeks, nose, and lips protruded —I almost expected him to grunt into the blanket.

[11] “We embraced and wept — tears of joy, mingled with melancholy — because we had once been young and were now both grey-haired and approaching the grave.He put on his clothes and went out to show me over his estate.

[12] “‘Well, how are you getting on here?’ I asked.

[13] “‘All right, thanks be, I’m enjoying myself.’

[14] “He was no longer the poor, timid clerk, but a true proprietor, a gentleman.He had settled down, and was entering with zest into country life.He ate a lot, washed in the bathhouse, and put on flesh.He had already got into litigation with the village commune, the brick-works, and the bone-kilns, and took offence if the peasants failed to call him‘Your Honour’.He went in for religion in a solid, gentlemanly way, and there was nothing casual about his pretentious good words.And what were these good words? He treated all the diseases of the peasants with bicarbonate of soda and castor-oil, and had a special thanksgiving service held on his name-day, after which he provided half a pail of vodka, supposing that this was the right thing to do.Oh, those terrible half pails! Today the fat landlord hauls the peasants before the Zemstvo representative for letting their sheep graze on his land, tomorrow, on the day of rejoicing, he treats them to half a pail of vodka, and they drink and sing and shout hurrah, prostrating themselves before him when they are drunk.Any improvement in his conditions, anything like satiety or idleness, develops to most insolent complacency in Russian.Nikolai Ivanich, who had been afraid of having an opinion of his own when he was in the government service, was now continually coming out with axioms, in the most ministerial manner: ‘Education is essential, but the people are not ready for it yet’, ‘corporal punishment is an evil, but in certain cases it is beneficial and indispensable’.

[15] “‘I know the people and I know how to treat them,’ he said.‘The people love me.I only have to lift my little finger, and the people will do whatever I want.’

[16] “And all this, mark you, with a wise, indulgent smile.Over and over again he repeated: ‘We the gentry’, or ‘speaking as a gentleman’, and seemed to have quite forgotten that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father a common soldier.Our very surname — Chimsha-Himalaisky — in reality so absurd, now seemed to him a resounding, distinguished, and euphonious name.

[17] “But it is of myself, and not of him, that I wish to speak.I should like to describe to you the change which came over me in those few hours I spent on my brother’s estate.As we were drinking tea in the evening, the cook brought us a full plate of gooseberries.These were not gooseberries bought for money, they came from his own garden, and were the first fruits of the bushes he had planted.Nikolai Ivanich broke into a laugh and gazed at the gooseberries, in tearful silence for at least five minutes.Speechless with emotion, he popped a single gooseberry into his mouth, darted at me the triumphant glance of a child who has at last gained possession of a longed-for toy, and said:

[18] “‘Delicious!’

[19] “And he ate them greedily, repeating over and over again:

[20] “‘Simply delicious! You try them.’

[21] “They were hard and sour, but, as Pushkin says: ‘The lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths.’ I saw before me a really happy man, one whose dearest wish had come true, who had achieved his aim in life, got what he wanted, and was content with his lot and with himself.There had always been a tinge of melancholy in my conception of human happiness, and now, confronted by a happy man, I was overcome by a feeling of sadness bordering on desperation.This feeling grew strongest of all in the night.A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear him moving about restlessly, every now and then getting up to take a gooseberry from a plate.How many happy, satisfied people there are, after all, I said to myself! What an overwhelming force! Just consider this life — the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, all around intolerable poverty, cramped dwellings, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying....And yet peace and order apparently prevail in all those homes and in the streets.Of the fifty thousand inhabitants of a town, not one will be found to cry out, to proclaim his indignation aloud.We see those who go to the market to buy food, who eat in the day-time and sleep at night, who prattle away, marry, grow old, carry their dead to the cemeteries.But we neither hear nor see those who suffer, and the terrible things in life are played out behind the scenes.All is calm and quiet, only statistics, which are dumb, protest: so many have gone mad, so many barrels of drink have been consumed, so many children died of malnutrition....And apparently this is as it should be.Apparently those who are happy can only enjoy themselves because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and but for this silence happiness would be impossible.It is a kind of universal hypnosis.There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him — sickness, poverty, loss — and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others.But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly, like the wind in an aspen-tree, and all is well.

[22] “That night I understood that I, too, was happy and content,” continued Ivan Ivanich, getting up.“I, too, while out hunting, or at the dinner table, have held forth on the right way to live, to worship, to manage the people.I, too, have declared that without knowledge there can be no light, that education is essential, but that bare literacy is sufficient for the common people.Freedom is a blessing, I have said, one can’t get on without it, any more than without air, but we must wait.Yes, that is what I said, and now I ask: In the name of what must we wait?” Here Ivan Ivanich looked angrily at Burkin.“In the name of what must we wait, I ask you.What is there to be considered? Don’t be in such a hurry, they tell me, every idea materializes gradually, in its own time.But who are they who say this? What is the proof that it is just? You refer to the natural order of things, to the logic of facts, but according to what order, what logic do I, a living, thinking individual, stand on the edge of a ditch and wait for it to be gradually filled up, or choked with silt, when I might leap across it or build a bridge over it? And again, in the name of what must we wait? Wait, when we have not the strength to live, though live we must and to live we desire!

[23] “I left my brother early next morning, and ever since I have found town life intolerable.The peace and order weigh on my spirits, and I am afraid to look into windows, because there is now no sadder spectacle for me than a happy family seated around the teatable.I am old and unfit for the struggle, I am even incapable of feeling hatred.I can only suffer inwardly, and give way to irritation and annoyance, at night my head burns from the rush of thoughts, and I am unable to sleep....Oh, if only I were young!”

[24] Ivan Ivanich began pacing backwards and forwards, repeating:

[25] “If only I were young still!”

[26] Suddenly he went up to Alekhin and began pressing first one of his hands, and then the other.

[27] “Pavel Konstantinich,” he said in imploring accents.“Don’t you fall into apathy, don’t you let your conscience be lulled to sleep! While you are still young, strong, active, do not be weary of well-doing.There is no such thing as happiness, nor ought there to be, but if there is any sense or purpose in life, this sense and purpose are to be found not in our own happiness, but in something greater and more rational.Do good!”

[28] Ivan Ivanich said all this with a piteous, imploring smile, as if he were asking for something for himself.

[1898]

Notes

1.Text A is an abridged part of Anton Chekhov’s short story Gooseberries.

2. Anton Chekhov: He was an important Russian playwright and master of modern short stories.In his works, he tried to explore below the surface of life by using simple techniques.He authored several hundred short stories and gained popularity as a playwright from The Seagull.He was regarded as a representative of the late 19thcentury Russian realist school.

After You Read

Knowledge Focus

1.Discuss the following questions with your partner.

1) Who was telling the story?

2) In what kind of family were the brothers brought up?

3) What kind of person was Nicholai?

4) What life did Nicholai live? And why?

5) Did Nicholai realize his dream? Was he happy?

6) Describe the estate Nicholai owned? Was it beautiful?

7) Analyze Ivanich’s argument against happiness in Gooseberries.Why does he claim that there is nothing sadder than the sight of a happy person?

8) Why do you think Ivan wanted to be young again?

9) Are you living a meaningful life? What kind of life is a meaningful life?

10) What’s the purpose of your life?

2.Learn literary devices together with your partner.

Tone is the attitude a writer takes towards a subject or character: serious, humorous, sarcastic, ironic, satirical, tongue-in-cheek, solemn, objective.

Discuss with your group members what tone Chekhov used in Gooseberries.Use one adjective to describe the tone and provide evidence to support your opinion.

3.Speech.

Prepare a 5-minute speech based on the topic: My Understanding of Happiness.

Language Focus

1.Fill in the blanks with the following words from this text.

1) It is a ________ title, so John Howard will become Sir John Howard on his father’s death.

2) At night, gangs of young people ________ the city streets when I was a student.

3) The house looks old and the paint is already starting to crack and ________.

4) Young babies obtain all the ________ they need from their mother’s milk.

5) Experts wouldn’t ________ too much weight to his findings, so he was very disappointed.

6) The owners are so ________ — they’ve refused to pay for new carpets or even a bit of paint to brighten up the house.

7) After ________ in obscurity for many years, her early novels have recently been rediscovered.

8) My neighbor was a (n) ________ old lady who didn’t speak to anyone.

9) Out of a job, she was having trouble meeting her ________ payments.

10) His long experience at the United Nations makes him ________ to the talks.

11) Parents need to be fully informed so they can make a ________ decision.

12) He managed to hang on to a piece of rock ________ from the cliff face.

2.Fill in the blanks with the right adverbs or prepositions.

1) After coming back from France, he embarked ____ a new career as a teacher.

2) As an art major, I suppose I could go ____ ____advertising.

3) John’s extremely fond ____ pointing out other people’s mistakes.

4) I don’t have much sympathy ____ her — I think she’s brought her troubles on herself.

5) The symptoms of the illness differ greatly ____ men and women.

6) We’ve been saving ____ to go to New Zealand.

7) The robber made a dart ____ the door.

8) He looked very handsome ____ his new jacket, and his mom said that he looked nice____ blue.

3.Read the following sentences and identify the tense used in each sentence.

1) They say man only needs six feet of earth.But it is a corpse, and not man, which needs these six feet.

2) And anyone who has once in his life fished for perch, or watched the thrushes fly south in the autumn, rising high over the village on clear, cool days, is spoilt for town life, and will long for the countryside for the rest of his days.

3) Money, like vodka, makes a man eccentric.

4) “You’re losing the thread,” put in Burkin.

5) ...life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him —sickness, poverty, loss — and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others.

6) I left my brother early next morning, and ever since I have found town life intolerable.

7) I can only suffer inwardly, and give way to irritation and annoyance, at night my head burns from the rush of thoughts, and I am unable to sleep.

8) As I was to leave the next day, I went to bed early on Wednesday evening.

9) The plane is taking off at 2:30 p.m.

10) I’ve been reading the novel for 2 hours.

4.Complete each sentence with the best answer provided.

1) ________ last year and is now earning his living as a lawyer.

A.He would leave school B.He left school

C.He had left school D.He has left school

2) It’s reported that by the end of next month the new building of this hospital ________ .

A.will have been completed B.has been completed

C.will be completing D.has been completing

3) They finished the research project earlier than they ________ .

A.have expected B.were expected

C.were expecting D.had expected

4) While people may refer to television for up-to-minute news, it is unlikely that television ________ the newspaper completely.

A.replaced B.have replaced

C.will replace D.replace

5) Until then, her parents ________ from her for one year.

A.didn’t hear B.hasn’t been hearing

C.hasn’t heard D.hadn’t heard

6) There ought to be less anxiety over perceived risk of getting cancer that ____ in the public mind today.

A.exists B.exist C.existing D.existed

7) I ________ my coffee when the door bell rang.

A.had B.had been having

C.was having D.have been having

8) She ________ in a gift shop, but now she is the manager of a big supermarket.

A.used to working B.was used to work

C.used to work D.was used to working

9) The school board listened quietly as John read the demands that his fellows ________ for.

A.was demonstrating B.had been demonstrating

C.demonstrate D.have demonstrated

10) The interview ________ one hour by the time it ends.

A.has lasted B.lasts C.is lasted D.will have lasted

Comprehensive Work

1.Debating.

Ivan and his brother seem to have different personalities.Think about the causes of their difference.

Debate what has accounted for their difference, nature or nurture.

2.Pair work: symbols.

Symbol is using an object or action that means something more than its literal meaning.Rose, for example, symbolizes love.

Work with the partner to explain the symbolic meaning of gooseberries in this story.

3.Writing.

Compare Ivan’s way of life and his brother’s.Which one do you support? Write an essay to express your opinion.

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